Exactly as predicted

China’s policy of lockdowns and quarantines prevented most of its citizens from being exposed to the Wu Han Flu, and so … China is facing a COVID-19 nuclear winter the CCP can’t stop.

Perhaps as many as 90% of China’s 1.41 billion people will come down with COVID-19, said Feng Zijian, former deputy chief of China’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention, to Bloomberg News. Feng predicts 60% of the population will be infected in the first wave.

China did not have to wait long. There is now a fast-moving wave ripping through Beijing.

The capital city was not prepared. “We have a child with a high fever but all the pharmacies are out of ibuprofen,” said a Beijing resident surnamed Lin to the Financial Times. “It came too fast, we didn’t have time to prepare.” Shortages are widespread. “Beijing is running out of medical supplies,” the London paper notes.

The situation is so bad, Peking University’s Michael Pettis reports on Twitter, that Beijingers are thinking of deliberately exposing themselves to the disease, so they won’t get it later when the public health care system has completely broken down.

This article in Foreign Affairs from January 26, 2022, is behind a paywall, but its headline is sufficient to make the point:

China’s Immunity Gap

The Zero-COVID Strategy Leaves the Country Vulnerable to an Omicron Tsunami

And also this, from this year:

The zero Covid policy, which has kept cases and deaths in China to negligible numbers throughout the pandemic, seems doomed to fail in the face of the highly transmissible Omicron variant of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, they believe. But the Chinese leadership does not appear to be mapping a path to a safe exit ramp, leaving experts worried the country could see a tsunami of cases that would swamp its health care system if the national containment effort collapses.

“I think they’re very poorly prepared and based on what we have seen in Hong Kong — which is probably the best proxy for what might happen in China — this could be fairly devastating,” Francois Balloux, director of the University College London’s Genetics Institute, told STAT in an interview.

A number of countries — Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore among them — also adopted a zero Covid policy earlier in the pandemic, limiting entry to people who had quarantined and tested negative for the disease. But most of the zero Covid nations used the policy to buy time until vaccines were developed and deployed. Once their populations were protected, they transitioned out of the restrictive policies.

China, however, appears to believe it can fend off the virus indefinitely. With cases mounting to hitherto unseen levels — about 40,000 a day for the past several days — experts who have tracked the virus’ trajectory through the rest of the world shake their heads at what they see as an unattainable goal.

And paradoxically [where’s the paradox?— Ed] the very fact that Chinese authorities protected their people from Covid for so long now renders them more vulnerable to the disease.